Well booklub has been progressing while I've been online elsewhere! Thought it might be a good time to do a summary of recent winter reading. Going on Miss J's theme, of the 'accidental book club' the first three are examples, of books that have just floated to me from saying to people (or them saying to me) can you lend me a book? Whatever you can spare, I'm going to cross the ocean so you might not get it back. You don't get really treasured reads that way, but you get sort of zeitgeist, recent stuff and just randoms too. In this way, we have a kind of informal book club among some greenpeace women. Basically a habit we're getting of circulating whatever books we buy amongst three or four chicks, as all of us are somewhat temporary residents in Europe. Then we sometimes talk about them in the pub.

The Reader (now a film with Kate Winslett in an oscar winning role) -Bernard Schillink. (from Cindy) This is a very quick read, quite engaging, and moves from a kind of risque love story from the first-person perspective of a young German school boy, to something else entirely. I think I'd still like to see the film, and my guess is they might tell the narrative in a different order, using flashback, which would be interesting. I found it very poignant and touching towards the end. It contains a sequence where two people have a connection only through letters for a period of time, which was particularly bitter-sweet for me, having experienced that somewhat.

Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee. (from the Christian)
Coetzee is very big in Australia I think, and has won a Nobel for literature. This book is more like a collection of long-ish essays, but put into the mouth of this fictional writer, Costello. I think JM is a man, and I generally like it when writers create a character of the opposite gender. In this book, the protagonist has won prestigious awards, and has an international following. In parts it left me a bit cold and thinking "what?, why has this narrative swerved off onto a long and somewhat scholarly discussion of vegetarianism, and what happened to the son who was just there a minute ago?". It's like Coetzee's using this book more as a clever thought-exercise than to convey a real story, and it is stretched a bit thin in some parts. Also, I didn't understand every reference so I got the feeling you just had to be more well read in the classics to really feel satisfied on all levels its operating. Jade, you might enjoy the exploration of ideas about animals and humans and their place in the world, as stand-along pieces - perhaps in extract!

White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (also from Cindy)
Won the Man booker prize last year. Indian writers who show us western culture against and eastern sensibility have been pretty popular (at least on my bookshelf!) for a few years. Zadie Smith's White teeth is one of my favourites and I've also enjoyed Buddha of Suburbia, Hari Kunzru's Transmission, God of Small things, and more. Actually I'm constantly trying to pick books that aren't actually about a middle class, 20th century, white woman or man in US/ UK or Australia. Can be tough at times. This one hasn't left such a lasting impression for me as those ones that come straight to mind. It's pretty bleak, about a guy raised in rural India and his quest to do better for himself, I think he ends up in Mumbai. Most of it is about the lead up to life-changing situation, I would say you could sum it up as an experience of total corruption, that then sets him on the path to being "successful." There's plenty to think about while you're reading, what is success really, what is it like to feel locked into a pre-determined life of obligations and duty. The main character suffers a whole lot of humiliations and defeats in the first part. He holds himself apart from others around himself, always wanting to be above them, incorruptible in a way. There's plenty of sly humour, and it pushes a couple of boundaries, like all good tales. But it's a fairly straightforward book - not sure if I'd put it in the big super-star awards category. But then I don't have to read and pick from the whole shortlist either!

Current: The Eternal Frontier - Tim Flannery (from the discount shop in Amsterdam)
Reading books like this is a bit 'back to my roots' of straight ecology - hundreds of pages of at times almost boring descriptions of waves of animal and plant evolution across the American continent. Tim has a kind of scientific sub-text though.. the growing weight of evidence that arrival of humans can dramatically alter a continent's fauna and environment, through intense hunting. Weirdly this is quite a controversial proposition amongst some circles, and that may be holding us back from actually recognising that we've (cough) -fucked the climate-! Anyway, this one is more a 'straight' monograph so far, on the creation of the plants, animals and people who inhabited America, up to Columbus's arrival in 1492. But throughout all his writing he wants to add the idea that humans can radically alter their environment, they are not just products of it - not so strange really, but somehow anathema to some branches of technology and science. Loving the geeky stuff about paleo-megafauna, also just getting into the section on evolution of cultures too.

Me talk pretty one day - David Sedaris (from the discount shop in Sydney)
Had high hopes for this one, got it second hand, saved it up for the plane ride home. I found his book "Dress your children in corduroy and denim" hilarious and just so 'out there' as he shared the more ridiculous sides of his own up-bringing. This book was written before that one, and was more self-conscious, less laugh-out-loud funny. Still worth a go while travelling, but I wouldn't bother buying if I were you.

To see every bird on earth - Dan Koeppel

I guess this book is a memoir, as much as it is a novel, but it felt like reading a novel. It's subtitled 'A Father, a Son, and lifelong Obsession', where bird watching - and specifically bird listing is the obsession. At the time of writing, his father had seen over 7,000 birds. That's 7,000 species, not just 7,000 flappy squawky individuals. Seen and identified them, using all manner of field guides. Seen and identified them in all manner of hard to get to places. And then recorded them, meticulously, with cross referencing and reference to the official tally of species for a region. Changing the list as species are deemed to have been split or 'lumped' (as taxonimists decide that one species is actually two different ones that look pretty similar, or decide that two are really the one). To get this list his father dedicated huge chunks of time and attention to his pursuit, becoming more and more single minded about it as he grew older.

The story jumps from the past to the present, linking stories of Dan's grandparents' lives as they left Europe in war, and adapted to life in America, memories from his own childhood and his parent's marriage in it's early days, goes off on tangents about the history of bird watching, or of other famous listers, includes tales of adventure in far flung places as people hunt down birds to spot. And it does this all rather effortlessly, not a dry tedious detail book, but seeming rich with interesting stories that ebb and flow around each other. What I found most interesting was the author's own story of coming to terms with his father's reality, and the generous and philosophical way he looks at his dad's own childhood, and the pressures on him, and the joy and escape he got from watching birds (as well as the relentless family pressure to enter a career in medicine in give up any notion of being an ornithologist), and his conjecture that the repression ended up with the love of bird watching becoming an obsession. But he says it all so much more kindly and interestingly than I do. It was interesting to trace the author's own story of himself as a child and young man, and how his father and he interrelated, and to see that although there were periods of estrangement and hurt (when he wished his dad was different and more available to him) in the end he got to a point of trying to share their lives however they best could - which ends up with him with binaculors in the Amazon with his dad sharing the moment of him spotting his 7,000th bird.

It's quite interesting to look at the kind of behaviour in the book that is easy to say falls squarely outside the 'norm', and consider how these boundaries might gently blur - all the different kinds of tallies and lists that people make, all the different kinds of 'spotters' out there, as well as the garden variety tally-er (to-do, countries I've been to, books I've read, bands I've seen.. etc). Makes you wonder about (and the book explores this too) some general desire in humans to feel more in control through recording and counting, and maybe, in terms of bird watching, to feel connected to the wonderous abundance of nature. But maybe a little more the former than the latter.

If you like stories about people and what might or might not make them tick, tales of 'the life less travelled', how other people navigate their family dynamics, or you just want to appreciate birds just that little bit more, this one gets a double thumbs up.

Lighthousekeeping - Jeanette Winterson

"Words are the part of silence that can be spoken"

Well, I was excited a few months back to get this book from my local second book shop, one of the few of hers that I hadn't read. And I liked it. It is a fairytale of sorts, a few tales woven together - one of a young girl who is orphaned and goes to live in a lighthouse with Pew, an old blind man who can nonetheless 'see', and his ancestors, and a love and not love story of Dark, an unhappy and conflicted priest who inspires 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde', and also of fossils found on the cliffs of the oceanside town, which attract Darwin and his followers. It has lots of similar themes to her other works: dwells on the nature of love (Winterson is a big old softie and has great faith in romantic love as a force of transformation), identity, family ties (not the tv show), the joys of simple living, and the magical power of stories to create the world around us and the meaning the world has for us.

A passage about Dark:
"He grew to dread the hesitant tread on the stairs to his room that overlooked the sea. She carried the tray so slowly that by the time she reached his room the tea had gone cold, and every day she apologised, and every day he told her to think nothing of it, and swallowed a sip or two of the pale liquid. She was trying to economical with the tea leaves.
That morning, he lay in bed and heard the clinking of the tea cups on the tray, as she came slowly towards him. It would be porridge, he thought, heavy as a mistake, and muffins studded with raisins that accused him as he ate them. The new cook - her appointment - baked bread plain, and disapproved of 'fanciness' as she called it, though what was fancy about a raisin, he did not know."

Pew says:
"Don't regret your life, child. It will pass soon enough."

And later, the hero, grown up and in Italy:
"I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed with measurement. The world just pours it out."